unload technical debt and transform commerce · ecommerce is a phenomenon that companies had to...

Unload Technical Debt and Transform CommerceShed technical baggage to succeed in the next era of commerce

eCommerce is a phenomenon that companies had to figure out along the way. They knew the digital model would grow to become critical to their business, so they built websites to support online transactions, and bought software as they went.

Fast-forward 20 years. Two decades of acquiring and integrating technology made brands unintended IT companies.

As technology matured, so did stacks, but that didn’t stop companies from acquiring and cobbling together more solutions to compete in a changing market. Custom integrations begot custom code - especially with complex stores systems and add-on applications to handle new channels.

Brands have been left with untenable IT environments1 after spending millions of dollars and years on customization. They’re left shouldering a kludge that is in no way upgradable.

These short-term decisions compounded to create debt2 – and it’s come due.

Complex stacks are difficult to manage from a collaborative and operational perspective, they stifle innovation and they are incredibly expensive to maintain.

Retail companies have been known to spend up to 80% of their IT budget supporting existing systems.3

2 / Unload Technology Debt and Transform Commerce

Companies have to spend the majority of their technology budget to maintain aging systems in order to stay afloat, all while acquiring new systems required to keep up with the market. Consumers are in charge – and costs to remain competitive are only going up.

It’s not just Amazon driving disruption. Like stores, heavy stacks need to be right-sized.

The opportunity cost of old tech: Bringing a knife to a gunfight

Today’s market is more competitive than ever, and the new edge is speed of innovation. Technology debt not only describes the financial strain stacks are putting on companies in the midst of market disruption but also how it shackles them from being able to evolve at the speed the market now demands.

70% say technical debt severely limits their IT function’s ability to innovate.

72% say it greatly limits their ability to migrate to new technologies.

69% say it makes their IT function much less responsive to changes in the market.

Companies that go on to launch a second product, enter a second market, or lead a second technical revolution do so because their founders structured them not as one-offs to solve a specific problem but as engines of innovation that spawn a thousand experiments. – Harvard Business Review 5

- Accenture 4


While some liken their “differentiated” technology stack as their secret sauce, no amount of custom code will give one merchant the win.

Companies are spending millions with very little to show for it. Many legacy platforms are poorly equipped to deliver the personalized, omnichannel experiences consumers expect, leaving brands to pick and choose which customer-facing initiatives to execute on. And, once they begin to execute on strategic initiatives, there are months or years long lead times that shoppers (and competitors) won’t wait for.6

This is why new players have been able to swoop into established business models and immediately start disrupting the space… they don’t have the legacy baggage. These digital natives are able to quickly make informed decisions with newer technology and understand the implications of technology to their success – from their business model, their cost structure, to the data that drives strategy.7

Yeah, it’s easy for them to be innovative and fast and responsive to swiftly evolving consumers – they got to start from scratch.” My answer to that is simple: Exactly. That is exactly the price of technical debt. – Nikki Baird, Forbes8


According to Accenture, emerging players have found that a light, plug-and-play approach is more effective than a buy-and-hold, empire-building mentality.9 Adopting this IT perspective can help traditional companies remain competitive.

Incumbent businesses need a second-act strategy.10

Many CIOs are convinced that their current technology stack must remain core to the business because it would be too disruptive to remove it, and the systems still provide value to the business. In fact, 70% of CIOs say they want to keep their old systems in place as long as possible.12 The balance is understanding what can be leveraged in a modern architecture, and which anchors must be removed.

The options are not simply keeping what you have or rip and replace.

The second-act strategy may be a hybrid option that keeps some critical systems in place while the stack modernizes over time.

Technology is changing fast, and yesterday’s cloud is history. However, if you think cloud technologies can’t handle your requirements, think again.

Cloud has changed by orders of magnitude that surpasses what most teams can handle.13 New and emerging technologies have improved IT price and performance 2x, 5x and even 10x over previous generations.14 What used to be viewed as rigid and not enterprise-ready can now handle an impressive variety of complex needs.

Today, market share domination happens in “shark fin” bursts, where companies create new business models, products, and services rapidly. To survive, companies must adopt the exponential technologies that create those shark fins. – Harvard Business Review 11

75% of C-level executives say their company’s existence will be threatened if they fail to update their technology – Accenture15


Retailers can’t be in the database business anymore; instead, invest in skill sets like front-end developers, technology architects, and new differentiation in areas like personalization, eCommerce, and digital in-store experiences.

– Forrester17

Forrester: Cloud’s Rewards Outnumber Its Risks for Retailers Today16

• Reduced customization headaches and a greater focus on extensibility.

• The ability to scale up and down, on demand, from any location around the world.

• Access to the most innovative new data analytics and development services.

• Improved availability and faster response to failure.

• Failures and outages do not happen at higher rates than on-premise technology.

A second-act digital transformation is a perfect

opportunity to simplify the monolithic stack

that evolved out of short-term necessity. Dissecting what can be saved and what can be modernized will be unique to every business. Now is the time to plan accordingly and avoid pitfalls. Execute now in the short-term but plan for longer-term changes to turn the organization into an agile, innovate powerhouse.


Digital Transformation with Oracle Commerce Cloud

Evolving together with Oracle Commerce Cloud

While online brands enter their second act, so has Oracle.

Oracle Commerce (ATG and Endeca) has a rich history in powering the world’s most successful retail and B2B commerce programs, ranked as a Leader in Digital Commerce for 18 years.18

As consumer demands and market dynamics shifted, Oracle has developed a new service, Oracle Commerce Cloud, to ensure brands continue to succeed as commerce evolves.

Oracle Commerce Cloud is a fully featured, extensible SaaS commerce solution, deployed in the Oracle Cloud. It is a scalable, flexible, API-based SaaS platform enabling merchants to deliver bespoke experiences rapidly without the worry of managing performance, infrastructure, and upgrades.

Learning from decades of experience, Oracle has invested in streamlining complex tooling to simplify management while reducing cost and time to market.

Commerce Cloud offers greater agility and cost savings and unique extensibility and customization model; all of which is required in the ultra-competitive digital commerce market.


Oracle Commerce Cloud’s core development tenants come from working with our leading customers to understand:

Your business needs flexibility

Leveraging SaaS is a must to succeed in the next era of commerce, but how you do it will be specific to your business. Oracle understands that one size does not fit all, so customers have the choice of how they will deploy using integrated, headless, or hybrid models. Additionally, Oracle supports both B2C and B2B selling in a single platform, with the shared administration and site assets, so sellers with direct-to-consumer and wholesale / B2B business models can reduce costs and complexity by leveraging one platform with one price.

Integrating to today’s – and tomorrow’s – complex stack is critical

Many legacy technologies are crucial to the business and will remain. As an open, services-based platform, Oracle streamlines how Commerce Cloud has integrated to legacy third-party on-premise and cloud technologies. Additionally, Autonomous Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) and our leading Cloud Services suite including PaaS and IaaS can enable simplified data passing and custom development, while maintaining SaaS agility, upgradability, and cost control.

Customization of the customer experience is paramount

Older platforms have kept some brands away from SaaS because they lack extensive customization capabilities. Commerce Cloud’s revolutionary server-side extension model grants brand-conscious organizations total control to customize and extend the front-end customer experience without limits, or issues when receiving automatic push upgrades.

Security and scalability are key

Oracle’s heritage in powering the most extensive, most complex retail and B2B eCommerce sites continues into the cloud – but not all clouds are created equal. Oracle Cloud supports the biggest global enterprises and can scale to deliver performance on peak days, as well as handle all security and compliance measures from PCI to GDPR and whatever comes next.


How Oracle Commerce Cloud delivers on retail’s top 10 SaaS benefits

Forrester conducts studies with hundreds of business and IT executives to understand how important different factors are in SaaS adoption.19 To understand Oracle’s strategy and business value of the Commerce Cloud platform, let’s take a look at the top 10 benefits

of SaaS for Retail and Wholesale commerce decision-makers want to achieve with cloud technology, and describe how Oracle Commerce Cloud delivers on each.

Figure 1 retailers expect a broad range of cost, agility, collaboration, and innovation benefits from SaaS.

“How important were the following benefits in your firm’s decision to use SaaS?”

(Respondents who selected 4 or 5 on a scale from 1 (not a factor) to 5 (important factor) and who describe their industry as retail

or wholesale)

67%

67%

67%

67%

69%

69%

70%

70%

71%

75%

Support business innovation with new capabilities

Immediate availability of new features and functions

Easier to maintain than traditional software solutions

Delivers functionality not available in a traditional packaged software

Easier information sharing and collaboration

Allows us to focus resources on more important projects

To support a large number of mobile and remote users

Speed of implementation and deployment

Improved business agility

Lower overall costs

Base: 258 global software decision makers who describe their industry as retail or wholesale

Note: Not all choices are shown.

Source: Forrester Technographics® “It’s Cloud Go Time for Retailers,” July 2017


1. Lower Overall Costs

Oracle Commerce Cloud moves away from an on-premise “license, own, and develop” model to a SaaS subscription service model, with upgrades, pushed automatically, deployed from the Oracle Cloud. Commerce Cloud reduces TCO in the following ways:

• Service model: Oracle handles the infrastructure and eliminates the need for customers to purchase and

manage additional systems. (e.g., database, app server, hardware, software, etc.). Oracle offers a variety

of cloud-based services to assist with any virtual infrastructure (IaaS), integration (OIC), or platform (PaaS)

needs.

• Flexible subscription model: Commerce Cloud is sold as a subscription service, which helps customers

move from a CapEx to an OpEx model. Fees can be paid on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis, per

contract.

• Predictable, transparent pricing: Fees can be based on yearly page views (consumption model) or

revenue share, if desired. The Page View model sizes customers accordingly, allowing customers to know

exactly what they will pay within the page count; there are no hidden fees or minimums.

• Automatic upgrades included in subscription: Commerce Cloud regularly pushes automatic updates

throughout the year, so merchants get access to the most modern technology faster, and don’t need to

invest heavily in order to deliver innovation. There is no additional cost for upgrades and no maintenance

fees.

• Pre-integrated storefront features: Commerce Cloud has a fully featured storefront application

ready for configuration, versus full development. The Commerce Cloud storefront has built-in features

that allow Oracle customers to eliminate the need for additional vendor technologies while reducing

costly integrations. Drag and drop experience management, responsive design, A/B testing, product

recommendations,Image Scaling, and CDN are just a few of the features that come out of the box, included

with the subscription cost.

• Integrated customer service and stores: Commerce Cloud supports digital shopping across the web

and mobile devices, and customer support via a unified agent console call center application and an assisted

selling application for in-store support, service, and checkout from an iPad.

• B2C and B2B models in a single subscription, toolset: Oracle Commerce Cloud is the only enterprise

SaaS commerce solution that can support B2C and B2B selling in a single platform, with shared

administration and site assets. Retailers, wholesale and manufacturers who sell to companies and

consumers can reduce costs and complexity by leveraging one platform with one price.

Globally, 33% of decision-makers indicate that their firms have adopted public cloud platforms (IaaS and PaaS), up from 10% in 2013.20


2. Improved Business Agility

With an all-new drag-and-drop UI, business users can deliver targeted experiences that drive more revenue, faster. Tasks such as refreshed page design, optimizing personalized search, and refined navigation that requires IT intervention with other solutions can be done immediately by the business user with Oracle Commerce Cloud.

• Drag-and-drop business user toolset: Visual tools allows business users to build, optimize and preview

sites just as their intended audience would see them, on a variety of devices.

• Build, preview, and push live, on-demand: Business users can manage the entire experience in a single

plane and push updates live per scheduled publishing, or manually on demand.

• Control everything in one view: The commerce engine, experience management, personalization,

search and SEO, content, PIM, AI, AB testing, pricing, promotions, merchandising, media, and catalog

management are fully unified and managed centrally.

Creating a unique eCommerce experience may require custom coding, but the bottom line is that your new commerce platform must let business users easily innovate, iterate, test, and generally control the customer experience.

– Forrester21


Oracle Commerce Cloud is ranked #1 of out 18 commerce vendors for agile, fast deployments.23

3. Speed of implementation and deployment

Oracle Commerce Cloud has a variety of deployment options ranging from an out-of-the-box fully integrated storefront to headless. It’s provisioned immediately and ready to be customized to meet your business needs - often launching in a handful of months.

• Fast, nimble implementations: Oracle deploys your instance of Commerce Cloud quickly. Out-of-the-box

features and a modern cloud architecture simplifies integration and customization, so Commerce Cloud

sites go live in a fraction of the time of typical on-premise deployments – and faster than SaaS commerce

competitors.22

• Modern architecture and plug-ins save time: An API and REST web services architecture streamlines

integrations to critical systems. All functionality is accessible through easy-to-use REST Web Services, with

API documentation publicly available. Moreover, prebuilt plug-ins from technology partners in Oracle

Cloud Marketplace can help further reduce implementation time and dollars.

• Standards-based, flexible: Commerce Cloud leverages standards-based languages, allowing for faster

development, scalability, and readily-available skills. The storefront is built in HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and

NodeJS. There is nothing proprietary about working with Oracle Commerce Cloud.


4. Support a Large Number of Mobile and Remote Users

Expanding is critical for growth and Commerce Cloud was built from the ground-up to be mobile-first and to serve shoppers around the globe. With Oracle Commerce Cloud, there are no additional costs to serving mobile touchpoints or additional regions from the touchpoint of your original instance.

• Mobile-first: Commerce Cloud is fully Responsive / Adaptive and can support an optimized mobile

shopping experience from the same centralized UI without requiring additional work. Business users have

the option to tweak experiences by viewport further.

• Multisite: Commerce Cloud helps businesses expand into new countries, test new markets, and launch

new brands and business models without having to start from scratch, leveraging the same instance.

Merchants have the flexibility to determine if central or distributed teams will manage sites that share the

same – or unique experiences while leveraging shared integrations and content as required.

• Global language and payments support: Commerce Cloud supports 35+ languages and 60+ currencies.

Additionally, Oracle supports a variety of regional payments requirements from VAT and cash on delivery and

custom payment gateway integrations.

5. Focus resources on more critical projects

Oracle Commerce Cloud takes the burden of infrastructure, custom development and costly upgrades off of your hands and lets you focus exclusively on optimizing and innovating on the customer experience.

As a result, developers enable the business to meet their goals, simplify integrations, and experiment with modern technology in a low-risk way.

• Development teams become heroes: With Commerce Cloud, IT can focus on innovating, rather than

standard maintenance and workarounds; enabling the business to safely self-serve on their day-to-day

needs and reinvesting time into differentiating innovation, rapid development, and dramatically shortened

cycles.

• Budget is freed for impacting the customer experience: Merchants can focus on customer experience

initiatives that drive more engagement, revenue and loyalty instead of allocating the majority of their IT time

and budget to maintaining existing technology that does little to wow customers.

67% of retailers surveyed believe that moving to the cloud will allow them to move dollars away from application maintenance to fund new areas of innovation.24


6. Easier information sharing and collaboration

Commerce Cloud breaks traditionally siloed systems with an open platform that helps users stay connected. With a single source of the customer experience, unified data through the Oracle platform, and a 360 degree view of omni-channel shopper behavior, data is centralized and transparent.

• Single administration toolset, flexible options: With unified commerce activities all taking place in one

tool, there is greater visibility into the status and presentation of the site. Central or distributed teams can

share the same tool, leverage existing content, layouts, and integrations - or customize variations for their

needs.

• Visibility and Analytics: Unified administration means faster, greater visibility into real-time performance.

Commerce analytics, AB testing, AI metrics, traffic and customer service stats are instant and can be used

to optimize experiences quickly.

• Access tools from anywhere: Business and technical users of Commerce Cloud are able to make updates

from anywhere.

7. Delivers functionality not available in a traditional packaged software

Traditional licensed and cloud software often delivers a solution-in-a-box and requires costly integrations to a variety of ecosystem applications to deliver a table stakes experience. Oracle Commerce Cloud delivers everything you need to run a commerce site in a single solution – and how you deploy it is up to you.

• Loads of extras: The Commerce Cloud storefront has built-in features that allow customers to eliminate

additional vendor technologies such as drag and drop experience management, responsive design, A/B

testing, AI, product recommendations, image scaling,CDN, tax and payment gateways, content, and more.

All included with the subscription cost.

• Instant access to the newest features: Oracle R&D pushes releases throughout the year automatically–

without IT having to invest in the development of new features.

• Use – and add - whatever you please: Commerce Cloud is modular and flexible, so merchants can use

what they want from Oracle, and easily leverage outside technologies with an open integration framework.


8. Easier to maintain than traditional software solutions

Commerce Cloud lifts the burden of software maintenance both from a financial and operational perspective. There’s no more “getting behind” releases or embarking on an expensive and time-consuming upgrade process that disrupts the business.

• Custom work won’t create upgrade issues: Due to our unique server-side extension model, whatever

merchants do to customize their site experience is not impacted by new upgrades.

• No more falling behind: Oracle pushes updates to pre-production environments automatically, with

education provided on best practices for leveraging new features. There is no way to fall behind releases, or

missing features to meet shopper needs.

• No maintenance fees: Automatic upgrades come as part of your subscription costs, so there are no

ongoing maintenance fees.

9. Immediate availability of new features and functions

Commerce Cloud puts fresh features and technology into our customers’ hands automatically – all while saving their own R&D investment.

• Oracle R&D delivers the value: Oracle pushes new technology to you throughout the year so you can

support the latest commerce needs immediately.

• Start using features immediately: Pick up new features directly from your pre-production environment,

configure them, test them, and go live.

• Education and best practices: Oracle provides Release Readiness materials, webcasts, blogs and office

hours to make sure merchants and partners understand features coming and best practices on how to

leverage them.


10. Support business innovation with new capabilities

Commerce Cloud is a platform for innovation. Oracle eliminates anything that hinders merchants from focusing on delivering compelling commerce experiences and puts control in their hands.

• The latest technology available: With a modern cloud architecture, there are no limits on what your

Commerce Cloud site could look like or what new technologies it could leverage. Oracle’s automatic

upgrades keep customers ahead of the curve with experiences that are fresh and scalable as the business

grows.

• Empowering IT: IT can turn their focus from mundane site upkeep to innovation. API and REST services

architecture and unmatched SaaS extensibility keeps IT building, experimenting, testing – and directly

impacting business results, fast.

• Empowering the business: Business users have pixel-perfect control over the site to test and experiment

with new capabilities, without having to go to IT or wait on a backlog of requests.


Speed wins in the new era of commerce. Deliver on shopper needs quickly and efficiently. Get innovations to market. Experiment and execute on new growth opportunities.

Commerce continues to evolve – be ahead of the curve, embrace change, and grow with a new approach and the right technology.

Learn more about how Oracle Commerce Cloud can help you:

Learn more at oracle.com/commerce

Conclusion

Simplify your technology footprint.

Innovate to exceed consumer demands and stay ahead of competitors in a low-risk way.

Increase loyalty and revenue to every customer, every time.


http://oracle.com/commerce

Footnotes

1 MIT Sloan Management Review, “Technical Debt Might be Hindering Your Digital Transformation,” June 2018. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/technical-debt-might-be-hindering-your-digital-transformation/

2 Accenture, “Is Technology Debt Bankrupting your Competitiveness?,” 2017. https://www.accenture.com/t20170504T221347Z__w__/us-en/_acnmedia/PDF-43/Accenture-Strategy-Technology-Debt-PoV.pdf#zoom=50

3, 6, 11, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 24 Forrester Research, “It’s Cloud Go Time for Retailers,”July 2017

4, 9, 12, 15 Accenture, “In the Blink of an I.T.,” 2018.

https://www.accenture.com/t20180223T103955Z__w__/us-en/_acnmedia/PDF-72/Accenture-Exponential-IT-Anthem.pdf 5, 7, 10, 11 Harvard Business Review, “Finding your Company’s Second Act,” January-February 2018. https://hbr.org/2018/01/finding-your-companys-second-act8 Forbes.com, “Retailers Technical Debt Comes Due,” May 2018.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nikkibaird/2018/05/06/retails-technical-debt-comes-due/#38e3d26944de13, 14 CIO.com, “Governance as Code: Keeping Pace with the Rate of Change in the Cloud,” June 2018.

https://www.cio.com/article/3277611/digital-transformation/governance-as-code-keeping-pace-with-the-rate-of-change-in-the-cloud.html18 Gartner Research, Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce, June 2018. https://go.oracle.com/LP=71562?elqCampaignId=16194322, 23 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Digital Commerce, June 2018. https://go.oracle.com/LP=71562?elqCampaignId=161943


https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/technical-debt-might-be-hindering-your-digital-transformation/

https://www.accenture.com/t20170504T221347Z__w__/us-en/_acnmedia/PDF-43/Accenture-Strategy-Technolog

https://www.accenture.com/t20180223T103955Z__w__/us-en/_acnmedia/PDF-72/Accenture-Exponential-IT-Ant

https://hbr.org/2018/01/finding-your-companys-second-act

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nikkibaird/2018/05/06/retails-technical-debt-comes-due/#38e3d26944de

https://www.cio.com/article/3277611/digital-transformation/governance-as-code-keeping-pace-with-the-

https://go.oracle.com/LP=71562?elqCampaignId=161943

https://go.oracle.com/LP=71562?elqCampaignId=161943

Copyright © 2018, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission.

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.

ORACLE CORPORATION

Worldwide Headquarters

500 Oracle Parkway, Redwood Shores, CA 94065 USA

Worldwide Inquiries

TELE + 1.650.506.7000 + 1.800.ORACLE1

FA X + 1.650.506.7200

oracle.com

CONNECT WITH US

facebook.com/oracle youtube.com/oracle linkedin.com/company/oracle twitter.com/oracle

http://www.oracle.com

https://www.facebook.com/OracleCustomerExperience/

http://youtube.com/oracle

https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-cx/

https://twitter.com/OracleCX

http://www.oracle.com

unload technical debt and transform commerce · ecommerce is a phenomenon that companies had to...

Documents